In Australia, Companies Flee BlackBerry for iPhone

The woes for BlackBerry maker Research In Motion are now spreading Down Under with Australia’s flag carrier Qantas Airways dropping the company’s once dominant handset in favor of Apple’s iPhone.

Qantas will replace 1300 BlackBerrys with iPhones, with the company saying the iPhone offered a user-friendly interface and simple access to emails, contacts and calendars and met all of Qantas’ security requirements.

“There has been strong demand from Qantas employees for the iPhone, with a large majority of respondents to a recent survey indicating that this is their preferred smart phone option,” a Qantas spokesman said in a statement.

The move by Qantas is the latest by a major corporation in Australia to drop the Blackberry, a once ubiquitous tool for businesspeople. A  recent study by technology analyst firm Telsyte found nearly 40% of enterprises said the iPhone was their preferred brand of smart phone.

Last year optometrist chain Specsavers dropped BlackBerry handsets for its staff in favour of smart phones using Google’s Android operating system.

A report by Citi this week says Australia operates in an “Apple dominated” smartphone market, with iPhones making up 49% of the smart phone base, which is one of the highest penetrations in the world.

RIM said in a statement it remained committed to the Australian business market.

“No one has a better track record of securely managing mobile devices in the workplace than RIM. Our infrastructure is trusted by some of the most security conscious organizations in the world – including the Australian government. Security has and always will be a key concern for businesses,” the company said.

But Rodney Gedda, a senior analyst at Telsyte, warned that changes to market share among mobile phone companies in Australia could signal changes worldwide given the country’s mature mobile phone market.

“We are a good example of how the market can change rapidly,” he said.

RIM’s shares are trading at multi-year lows after last month posting a US$518 million loss and 33% drop in revenue in the latest quarter and delaying the release of its BlackBerry 10 operating system, which will power its latest phone, until early next year.

RIM also said it would cut 5,000 jobs, almost a third of the company’s global staff, in an effort to save $1 billion by the end of the current fiscal year, which ends next March. It also said it would delay its.

Qantas said the transition from BlackBerry to iPhone was part of the company’s broader mobility strategy which would result in “significant” cost savings.

“Savings will come from simplifying the infrastructure supporting the devices, from the devices themselves and from the data agreements reached with our providers,” the spokesman said.